How and why SMTJ made The Time Project

The Time Project is about everyone and everything that happens when making TV. It was born from conversations about overwork in our industry, and we realised no one has ever measured how much time workers in TV spend doing their jobs and how that might affect their lives. So, we made an app to do this.

Measuring the hours we spend making TV, then assessing by personal and work characteristics allows us to see how different groups are affected: if you are a black woman in Drama in Bristol, say, do you get paid less per hour than a white man in Manchester doing the same job? If you have a disability which means you can’t work, for example, more than eight hours a day – which, incidentally, is a standard working day - how many jobs are you excluded from? We might know the answers anecdotally, but no one has ever collected the data to prove it. If we can’t prove it, we can’t change it.

This is why we made the app that is The Time Project: to make the case for change. With this data we can address all the inequalities that long hours support and sustain. To make it work we need everyone to track their hours, get your mates to do it, get your boss to do it! Now, over to you…